My little brother Dilly went to spend the summer in Maine with Nana Shirley. I wanted to go terribly. Nana churned delicious, fresh strawberry ice cream with a hand crank. She could shuck a lobster, pulling out every scrap, using her rolling pin to press meat out of the crustacean’s thorny legs. She delighted in the “tomalley,” the mushy green paste I refused. We would pick blueberries from the bushes in her backyard for cobbler and shell peas into a large metal bowl at her kitchen table.
Daddy was collecting unemployment but was busy every day doing odd jobs, repairing roofs, and mowing lawns. The father who once took me for motorcycle rides, bought me Cow Tails, and carried me on his shoulders had been replaced by a gruff and scowling man. His face now shadowed with gloom and a rough smudge of beard. Quietly, I’d move around, emptying ashtrays, tidying beds, and sweeping the kitchen over the melted circle of floor from when I dropped a hot frying pan. We ate our dinner, usually boxed cheese macaroni or bologna sandwiches, in separate rooms. Each morning, I’d make sure the kitchen sink was emptied of dishes, and I would fill the coffee pot with Chock Full o’ Nuts before leaving the house while he was still in the bathroom having his “morning constitutional.” He did not seem to notice if I was gone all day as long as before I left the house each morning, his I’ma hoot! owl mug was scrubbed out and returned to the cupboard, and his jeans were back in his closet, washed, ironed, and hung onto wire hangers.
I’d ride my hideous bike over to Avery’s. A boy’s bike, the color of hot mustard, that Momma had found for me at a yard sale. She knew I wanted a bike, something fierce. I did my best to hide my disappointment as she, beaming, wheeled it up the driveway. My best friend Avery Hollis was adopted from China when she was two years old. She lives in a big house on Sutton Street with a two-car garage and a gabled roof. I was jealous of her cool, air-conditioned living room with spotless oyster shell carpet and candy dishes instead of overflowing ashtrays. Their kitchen counters are not cluttered with light bills and cans of wax beans. Her family eats dinner together every night at the dining room table set with an ivory tablecloth, matching plates decorated with tiny ferns, and goblets filled with ice water. Her mother serves fruit cups with real slices of kiwi, not the gooey canned cocktail mix with pale cherry buttons. I coveted Avery’s flouncy canopy bed and her bedroom television set programmed with premium cable. I envied her bike the most. Avery’s bike was a dream: pink handlebars with a flower-printed seat, white streaming tassels, a bell, and a basket covered in daisies.
When we were taking turns twisting each other’s hair up in rollers, Avery asked me, “Do you miss your mom?”
I nodded and asked, “Do you miss yours?”
She furrowed her brow and changed the subject, “Let’s go use the Slip ’N Slide.”
With that we tied shopping bags over our curlers and went to her backyard to launch ourselves across the expanse of freshly trimmed lawn on a synthetic runway of sprinkling hose water, giggling through friction burns and grass stains. I would have stayed in Avery’s house all summer, appreciating the heavenly central air and eating the prim lunches Mrs. Hollis prepared: triangled sandwiches, pickle spears, and Frescas. To my dismay, on the first of July, Avery was off to an overnight camp for girls in Vermont.
On our last afternoon together, Avery dazzled me with an exhibition of her pink makeup case bursting with drugstore cosmetics that she planned to sneak into camp. There were eyeshadow palettes, tubes of lipstick, pots of shimmery gloss, and assorted pencils. She gave me a full makeover with blocks of emerald and fuchsia eye shadow, jade eyeliner, volumizing mascara, a stripe of blush, and she finished off with peach frost lip gloss. My freckles vanished under the pressed powder; she wound my cherry cola-colored mop in a snug chignon. Returning home, I strutted in with a dramatic thwack! of the screen door.
My father looked up from a small motor he was repairing at the kitchen table and groused, “Go wash that shit off your face; you look like a clown.”
After Avery left for Camp Abenaki, I hung out with Sadie Boon. Sadie lived in the Gullet, what people in town called the labyrinth of public housing in the west end. There were twelve kids in the Boon family, ranging in ages from 6 to 20. The other Boon children included Benjamin (Benji), Linda (Lindy), Angela (Big Ang), twins Maureen (Mo) and Mary, Teresa (Tess), Judith (Joda), another set of twins, Sharon (Sha) and Michelle (Belly), Jeremy (Jere), and the eldest, John, who was inexplicably nicknamed Sauce. Everyone but Sauce lived stacked upon each other in their booming, tangled house. He had a rented room in the center of town over a plumbing supply store. The Boons also had an assortment of varicolored cats: Soot, Jellybean, Patch, Dice, Mittens, and Batman that weren’t exactly theirs but moved in and out of the house freely, napping on piles of laundry or yowling for scraps.
Sadie’s mom could usually be found smoking cigarettes and clucking her tongue with the other ladies on various stoops around the Gullet. I never once heard her dad speak, but we would often see him hunched over, repairing some neighbor’s car. Other men gathering around like turkeys, nodding their approval or cutting in with their counsel. Sadie and I would make up dance routines and sun ourselves on bendy lounge chairs in her driveway, slathering our legs with baby oil. She would mix us biting drinks from vodka lifted from her mother’s giant plastic bottle mixed with Hi-C, careful to refill the vodka bottle with an inch or two of tap water.
Lindy, the reluctant substitute grown-up of the Boon clan, would hand Sadie a shopping list, hurrying us out to the farmers’ market, where some of the vendors took food stamps. Lindy was well known for her nourishing one-pot meals, and if Sadie invited me to stay for dinner, she’d nod and toss one more potato into the pot. On the menu that night was Lindy’s Hamburger Stew, and we were sent with instructions to obtain onions, celery, carrots, green beans, and tomatoes.
The farmers’ market was a grid of stalls on the town hall lawn. Some were selling an assortment of vegetables; others, embellished loaves of sourdough. There were jars of honey and church lady jams, farm-fresh eggs, fresh-cut flowers, and herb starters. One stall, Magpie Soaps, featured soap bars in varying shades, each wrapped neatly in a wide strip of paper and stamped with the image of a black and white bird. Behind the table, a pretty woman with a heart-shaped face and a waterfall of midnight hair cascading past her bottom was arranging the soaps.
“Can I interest you in anything?” She chirped.
Surveying the soap labels, I wondered, “I’ve never heard of these kinds of soap.”
She bubbled, “These are very special soaps, named for the ones I love! “This soap,” she says, pointing at a pinky-petaled soap, “is graceful and feminine, made with chamomile, rose petals, and jasmine, and is named for my mother, Rosa. This one,” holding up a soap labeled Silvano, “with notes of vanilla, leather, and tobacco, is earthy and complex, just like my father. This one, made with oats and honey, is used to soothe and gently rub away your troubles, like my grandmother Valentina does. This one,” she said, lifting it to her nose and inhaling deeply, “is a cozy hug and a cup of café de olla, with cinnamon and cloves for my godmother, Inés. There is also one for my dear friend João, hardworking, salt of the earth with charcoal, coffee, and flor de sal. Oh, and this beauty over here is Zofia; withorange, lulo, pepper, and vetiver, it is a perfect blend of zesty and grounding. For that,” she decided, nodding at the heat rash blooming on the creases on my arms, “You’ll need Clara; it’s pure goat’s milk, excellent for healing rashes.”
“Oh, sorry, no,” I protested. “I don’t have any money with me.”
“That’s ok,” she assured, “it’s on the house,” as she wraps the pearly bar in a paper bag with the black and white bird stamped on it.
“You’re Tawnee’s girl, right? Blue?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am,” I murmured, staring down at my filthy, flip-flopped feet.
Immediately, her face knit into an expression of sorrow as she handed me the bag.
“Thank you, ma’am.”
She smiled broadly and places her hand over her heart. “Not ma’am, Magdalena.”
Sadie’s parents didn’t squawk when she pierced her ears, icing them over the bathroom sink before popping a safety pin through each lobe. They didn’t object when she came out of the house wearing a belly shirt, a pair of gold hoops she stole from Joda, with her jeans slashed into shorts, the undersides of her cheeks hinting out like two scoops of vanilla ice cream above her tanned thighs. They didn’t flinch when Davey Holmes picked her up in his long yellow car, the sizable rust spots on the doors making it look like a giant bruised banana.
Davey was 22 and worked at the supermarket deli counter. He drove us to the quarry where older kids jumped and swam, lobbed stones, and spray-painted rocks with electrified graffiti, tags shouting “Bolt,” “Razor,” and “Jinx.”We hung out sharing his six-pack, listening to the echoes of teenagers hooting until sunset. Then Davey drove us to the carnival; he bought us tickets to ride the Scrambler. Sadie and I belly laughed, gripping the metal bar, hopelessly mashing against each other with every revolution. When Sadie and Davey decided to head back to the car to smoke a joint, I stayed behind and tried to use my last tickets to win a stuffed frog at a game by pitching baseballs at stacked milk bottles. After I floundered, the carny handed me a small rubber duck for my trouble and spat chew into a popcorn cup.
The moment I turned around, I was flanked by three horrible boys from school.
Sully, ruddy with a thick neck, taunted, “Hey, Blue, heard your mom’s at the nuthouse doing the Thorazine shuffle.” He imitated a moaning zombie with his tongue drooping from his mouth.
Chad, scrawny with a wiffle scalp, and Brandon, stout and greasy, joined in the heckling: “Funny farm!” “Loony bin!” “Booby hatch!”
I snarled at Sully, “Don’t worry about me. Worry about that disgusting zit on your chin!”
I jogged back to the field where the banana was parked. Through the rolled-down passenger window, I could see Sadie’s head bobbing up and down on Davey’s lap. He rested one hand on the steering wheel and the other lightly on her ponytail. I stood there frozen as though my legs were bound in irons, my cheeks scalding. He held her head like he was inspecting the ripeness of a supermarket cantaloupe before shoving it down hard into his groin as he began rapidly thrusting. The sounds of him crying out, insisting, “Swallow! Swallow!” unshackled me. I threw the rubber duck onto the dirt and ran, without stopping, all the way through the field to the pavement with street lights, through the town square, and down our road. When I ran through the front door trembling, my T-shirt was drenched in cold sweat, my throat stung, and my lungs felt blistered. After that night I didn’t go back to the Gullet, and I didn’t answer the kitchen phone in case Sadie was calling.
For many days I wilted at home alone, reading bowed paperbacks, sucking ice pops, and shouting into the box window fan just to hear another voice. I considered going to the town pool or the playground but couldn’t bear having to face Sully or Sadie. After days of talking only to the trembling robotic voice of the window fan, I rode my bike back to the farmers’ market. I wanted to thank the soap lady, as her buttery soap had cleared my rash and left my skin feeling as smooth as a baby’s butt cheek.
“Good morning, ma’am,” I began.
She responded, “What did I say? Not, ma’am. You can call me Magda, Maggie, Mags, Magpie, or even my full name, Magdalena Rosa Guadalupe Garcia!”
“Magpie, like your soap?”
“Yes, indeed,” she grinned. “That was my father’s endearment for me.”
“Thank you for the soap you gave me. It fixed my rash.”
She winked. “Do you know what the secret ingredient is?”
I shrugged.
“The secret ingredient is love.”
“Oh,” I said, faintly.
“You know, I could use a helper for soap making and someone to play with our daughter Clara so Zofia has a bit more time to paint. Are you interested?”
I nodded.
“We live in the only yellow house on Fiddle Road; you can’t miss it,” she beamed. “Come by tomorrow afternoon?”
The house was the color of marigolds with flowering magnolia trees in the front yard; their creamy blooms smelled of lemons. The living room was a kaleidoscope with turquoise walls, potted plants, woven tapestries, wooden masks, a carved coyote, and a large ceramic statue of the Virgin Mary. The centerpiece of the room was an enormous painting of striking Black women posing gracefully in flowing striped dresses with brimming bowls of fruit perched upon their heads.
“Zofia painted that,” Magdalena twinkled, waving toward the beautiful fruit women. “She’s in the garden right now.”
Through the back door, I could see a woman in blue jeans with a bandana tied over her head harvesting zucchini and summer squash, piling them high into a wicker basket.
“Blue, this is Clara,” Magdalena said as a little girl emerges from behind her skirt wearing an eyelet sundress, her hair expertly braided into a pattern of spirals.
“That’s Chooch,” Clara informed me as she gestures to an orange, pot-bellied cat licking his paw on the back of the sofa.
“Chooch is short for chuchuzinho,” Magdalena chimed. “It means little pumpkin in Portuguese. João named him. He found Chooch when he was a teeny kitten, no bigger than a can of corn, hiding out with the herd, filling his belly with goat milk. Now he’s the king of the castle.” She chuckled, affectionately patting Chooch’s head.
Chooch mewed in agreement.
“Clara, can you go help Mommy in the garden? I am going to go show Blue how we make the soap.”
Magdalena led me down the hall to a room with a sprawling table in the center, bins piled high on the counters, racks packed with neat stacks of soaps, and a gigantic bookcase lined with glass jars containing herbs, flower petals, and different kinds of salts. She handed me a long-sleeved smock, a pair of rubber gloves, and goggles.
“We need to be very careful with lye,” she advised. “We make cold process soaps; we get the raw goat milk from João. He has a little farm up the road with chickens and goats. We freeze the milk in these ice cube trays to prevent it from scorching.”
She demonstrated slowly adding the lye powder to the slushy milk in a large stainless-steel pot while warming another smaller pot of coconut and olive oil, adding heaping spoonfuls of shea butter. Then she stirred everything together with a stick blender, whipping it into a puddingy mixture.
“Today we’re making Carmelita, inspired by my cousin who composes medicines and remedies from her herb garden.”
I watched as she added drops of scented oils and dried thyme, rosemary, and peppermint leaves.
“Once we have our blend sorted, we pour it into these long molds and allow them to set for two days. After that, we pop the soap loaves out and use the soap cutter to divide them into ten bars. Then they cure on the rack for a few weeks before they are ready for the market.” She poured the mix into the soap mold, instructing, “It’s important to tap them to get rid of any bubbles!” Tap, tap, tap. “The next step is the most crucial part of the process. We must bless the soap so that it holds the properties we intend.”
“What does that mean?” I asked, puzzled.
“We must decide if this soap is meant to bring comfort or strength or inspiration. Carmelita is for healing and protection.”
Magdalena closed her eyes and placed her hands over her heart. “Mother of mercy and love, bless this soap with your divine protection and healing; may it cure every sickness, remove every pain, and restore the strength of all that it flows over. Let it be so.”
Over the next few weeks, I helped make and package and pray over the soaps. Clara and I brewed iced tea and fixed lemonade that we passed out in Dixie cups at the farmers’ market. We painted found rocks that we advertised as paperweights and sold for a quarter each at a card table next to Magpie Soaps. Zofia brought us to João’s farm to collect goat milk. He was a slight man, quiet, with a stooped back and crinkles around his eyes. He always wore a flat cap. When we visited, he’d let Clara and me play with the baby chickens, rubbing our faces on their downy black and yellow fuzz. João collected all the painted rocks we had made just for him and displayed them in the flowerbeds alongside his peonies.
Zofia showed me how to make sancocho with pork, plantains, and yuca. We taught each other card games and danced to upbeat music accented with drums, trumpets, and accordions. When the town showed Bringing Up Baby on a makeshift screen in the baseball field, the four of us sprawled on a quilted square and snacked on almond cookies and slices of watermelon sprinkled with chili. After the movie, Magdalena carried a sleeping Clara into the house, and Zofia drove me home with my bike crammed into their trunk. I sputtered, admitting to her that I yearned for Avery’s pretty pink bike.
“This is a nice bike, but you want a pink bike?” Zofia asked.
“No, I really wanted a purple one; that’s my favorite color. I know my mom wished it was purple; it is a good bike, but it’s an ugly bike,” I tittered, “though it flies fast all the way down Hillside Street!”
One morning after Zofia brushed through Magdalena’s thick tresses and braided Clara’s, applying a thin finger swipe of coconut oil between each of the rows, she set me down in front of her, brushing out my snarled cherry brown mane, parting it with a comb, and weaving the strands into tight Dutch braids. I softened into her skilled hands, but something pained me. I flashed back to Momma brushing my hair, serenading me with her hairbrush microphone, “Me and you are subject to the blues now and then, but when you take the blues and make a song, you sing them out again.”
I had willed myself not to think about Momma, not to miss the smells of her cooking or the pleasant fragrance of her shampoo. I longed to slip into her bed, tucking myself into the warm curve of her body, feeling the silkiness of her nightgown against my skin and the prickles of her legs that needed shaving. I had stopped looking at the photo on the dresser of her arms around Daddy, both grinning wide, him looking at her, her looking straight at whoever was taking their photo, sunlight flooding her curls, turning them the exact color of a shiny, brand-new penny.
“Blue, we’d like to pay you to do some deliveries for us,” Magdalena proclaimed one morning as Clara and I were playing Hi Ho! Cherry-O. “Modine’s, The Enchanted Bloom, and the Sugar Shack have all agreed to stock Magpie Soaps. We can pay you two bucks a delivery; what do you say?”
“Yes!” I whooped; I would have done it for free but hoped Daddy would be impressed.
“Fantastic! João says you’ll need to bring your bicycle over to him for a tune-up. We want to make sure it’s in tip-top shape for official company business.”
I couldn’t see why a tune-up would be necessary given that the drugstore, florist, and coffee shop were all within a two-mile loop.
“Okay!”
When I returned to collect my bike from João’s on Monday morning, he opened the barn door, revealing my bike repainted in gleaming metallic purple, the seat reupholstered with glittering silver vinyl, and a polished bell and large metal basket attached to the front.
I squealed, “Oh! Thank you, sir!”
He smiled politely, touching the front of his cap.
Thrilled, I rode through town, the wind jitterbugging through my hair past the public pool, through the town center, by the strip mall, and out to our road where Mrs. Gershon sat shucking corn, waving to me from her porch swing. I wondered what she was thinking just then, recollecting the day she stood in her yard in her housecoat, refilling her bird feeders, as I ran up to her, clutching my naked, howling baby brother. Stumbling, I wailed, “HELP ME!”
After Dilly was born, Momma would sit for hours on the side of her bed, speaking with the shadows on the wall. Sometimes she’d giggle at the shadows’ secret jokes; other times she had frantic arguments with them. Daddy had taken her to see a pack of doctors. I’d eavesdrop on him talking to Nana with hushed tones from the kitchen phone, reciting the collected conclusions. Round orange tablets and shock treatments followed, but Momma seemed to sail further away from our shore. One morning I was wiping up some juice I had spilled when I could hear her softly singing and cooing to Dilly as she gave him a bath. A sick feeling crowded in on me. I ran into the bathroom where she held Dilly under the water, his eyes wide, his little feet banging against the basin.
“Momma, no!” I shrieked, grabbing her shoulders, though she would not budge.
I could never explain how I sourced the strength that day, but I summoned a tiger. I clawed at her, snatching handfuls of her matted, coppery hair. I tore her away from the bathtub, accidentally slamming her head against the sink cabinet. I grabbed Dilly, coughing and sputtering, out of the tub and ran from the house, down the road to the Gershon’s, clinging to his heavy, slippery body. Mrs. Gershon dropped the bag of sunflower seeds as my screams pierced through the whirring of Mr. Gershon’s riding mower.
After that, Momma was sent to Oakhurst, a stone and concrete rectangle with crosshatched metal windows situated at the end of a long road of tall, ancient trees. It was decided that I would stay home this summer to help around the house and be here for when Momma got better.
At my Sugar Shack delivery, the counter girl gifted me a free peach kuchen muffin, and Mr. Modine gave me a Modine’s Drugs—Relief is within reach—promotional pen. As I rounded the corner outside Modine’s, I saw Sully, Chad, and Brandon leaning menacingly against the brick wall next to my bike.
“Nice bike, Blue. You do know it’s a boys’ bike? I’ve seen you hanging out with those lesbos. Are you a dyke too?”
“A fugly dyke with a nut-job mother,” they sniggered.
I swung my leg over and looked straight in Sully’s fleshy, rare-roast-beef face. “Your life must be so sad if this is what makes you happy,” I flung back, and pedaled away with my middle finger raised high.
Sully raged after me. “Fuck you, dyke!”
Nana was the one to tell me. She spoke tenderly, explaining that Momma was not responding to the medicines and treatments like they hoped. Now that Daddy’s unemployment had run out and no one around was hiring, he had found a job on a container ship with a five-month contract. She told me that I was going to ride the bus up to stay with her and said that she was so looking forward to taking me shopping for “smart clothes” and a “nice new book bag” for me to start the eighth grade there in Maine. She promised we could drive back to visit Momma for Christmas and said we’d light candles and pray every single day that she would be back to herself by then.
My friends threw a going-away party for me. Magdalena made tres leches, though my stomach hurt, not allowing me to savor the custardy cake. Clara gave me a drawing of her and me holding hands in a crayon world with two suns and endless loopy flowers.
Zofia cradled my face in both of her golden hands. “Never forget we love you, Indigo, baby.”
Daddy drove me to the station.
As the driver placed my cases underneath, Daddy counted out some limp bills and said, “Mind your Nana, and be helpful with Dylan.”
“Yes, sir,” I answered, accepting the sweaty wad of cash.
I stepped up onto the bus stairs and then turned back and hurled myself at Daddy, cleaving to his chest, my tears darkening his shirt. He held me there, wrapped me in his solid arms, and kissed the top of my head.
Nana transformed her attic room into a cheerful bedroom for me with a mint-colored chenille blanket, a maple bookshelf, and a writing desk. We spent days at the beach making sandcastles with Dilly. I covered his face with kisses and his belly with raspberries. We had clam boils and baked fruit pies. We picked apples and one-two-threedDilly into piles of leaves. One afternoon while I was helping make the cranberry relish, the mail truck rambled by.
Nana came back inside with a box. “Pudding, you have a package.”
When I opened it, it was loaded with creamy bars of soap swirled with blue. In elegant script, the note read, “We made Blue soap! With bright, sunny lemon balm and sweet dried blueberries from where you are now in Maine. The blue ripples are indigo powder for you, Indigo baby! May this soap shower you with grace. May you continue to be a light in this world, finding happiness in the tiniest things, and may you know that the fierce love of mothers everywhere is always with you.
Love, Clara, Zofia, and Magpie”